Cross Country Road Trip, Moving Truck Included
Complete with bad, low-res, fuzzy cell phone pictures. And one Holga shot. More better shots to come later.
So when I left on the 17th my apartment was, of course nowhere near packed. I ended up leaving later than I'd planned to catch my flight to Arizona (though, being that I'm always running late, this really isn't a surprise), and made the bus to Dulles at Rosslyn with literally not a second to spare. A relief as they only run once an hour. The flight out to Tucson was uneventful... just some people watching at Midway, a brief nap, and some reading. I flew Southwest, which I don't mind but for the whole bum rush queueing thing, which invariably involves at least one person behaving badly. This time it was a family that planted itself inside my personal space, periodically nudging me despite there being nowhere to go. We were B. Don't nudge me while A is still boarding, moron. And don't make your ignorant little brat do it either. I spent a lot of time deep breathing and restraining myself from pushing the father as he leaned heavily on my bag. A bag which was on my back.
Loading up the truck and cleaning Phil's place went pretty smoothly. We rolled out-- him driving the moving truck with the Land Rover on a trailer on the back, and me following in his Jeep-- at about eight in the morning. We made it into Sierra Vista, where we stopped (at my caffeine addicted insistance) for coffee at the Starbucks inside Target. Standing in line, waiting for our drinks Phil began to check all of his pockets. Then checked again. A third time. A dark look came across his face. He went outside while I waited for the drinks. Just as the drinks came up he returned. The keys to the lock on the back of the truck are missing. All of Phil's belongings are now safely and snugly stowed away in the back of a truck... that we may not get open. But wait! There's more! Along with his bed and darkroom equipment and books are his suitcase and mine. Our clothes, our shampoo, our toothbrushes-- all locked up tight inside the truck.
Of course, this being the only mishap of the trip, is not so bad. But I suddenly realized I was going to meet his family for the first time in clothes I will have been wearing for three straight days. I suddenly imagined them declaring their discomfort at the thought of him marrying that smelly woman.
But it really was the only thing that didn't fall into place-- we had great weather, we made great time, no driving mishaps. The last time I drove east from Arizona was in 1997 on the cross country trip from hell with ex-husband. (It was actually mostly fine until we got to Salt Lake City. Then it all went to hell in a hand basket. And that was on the way out. We still had to come back. I have no recollection of the drive back except that I know we stopped in Santa Fe and Texas. After Amarillo my memory goes completely blank), and on that trip I didn't go through most of the states we went through, or even the parts of the states we went through this time that I had gone through before.
New Mexico looked a lot like Arizona... until we got close to Texas. I have to admit up front that I have not been a fan of Texas. My Texas experiences have been limited (a lot of time at the Houston and DFW airports, an overnight in Amarillo, interactions driving through on that trip in 1997), but memorable in their unpleasantness, and compounded by a couple of incidents with Texans outside of their natural habitat that have been.... memorable and unpleasant. (There is a novel to be written about the Texan a friend in grad school dubbed "G.I. Joe.") But I've been revisiting people/places/things (nouns of all stripes!) that I haven't had warm fuzzies about in the past to see if they are flavors I have grown to appreciate. (See my unfinished blogging about that trip to Italy) Sadly, Texas did nothing to reverse my earlier impressions... in fact, it seemed hell bent on confirming my earlier impressions.
Back to New Mexico. Which was mostly pretty in that Southwest-y kinda way (a flavor I like). Until you get close to El Paso. For the twenty or so miles leading up to the Texas border the landscape changes, less pretty, less interesting, and then suddenly very, very stinky with nothing but cattle and pig farms and giant stinking piles of animal manure that invade the car. I was gulping air in short bits, just trying to get through the stench. And when you're through, you're in El Paso.
Phil saw a job posted a while back in El Paso and joked that he should apply for it. I'd never been to El Paso and thought, well... maybe? At least we wouldn't be apart.... He, having been there, said it wasn't possible. Which I now get. It was not a town that had our happiness written all over it. I remember reading an article (I think in the New Yorker) a while ago about the hundreds of women who have been killed in Juarez in recent years, the article mentioning that Juarez was across the border from El Paso. Somehow I didn't imagine that it was really right there. The highway, for a while, follows the river so that coming from the west you look left to see El Paso, and to the right is the river next to the highway with Juarez on the other side. And not a large river-- more like the river that ran through and was named after the medium sized town in Western Mass. where I went to high school. The Texan side of the border was fast food joints and strip clubs and worse for the wear clapboard bungalows with worse for the wear cars hulking in front of them; the Mexican side was dusty streets and cement buildings the size and shape of shipping containers. All the allure of a border town with a military base in it. There may be (and probably are) nicer parts of town, but wowzers, what you see from the highway sure doesn't make you want to search for them.
On the other side of El Paso was just miles and miles and miles and miles of dusty, bleak landscape. So dusty the visibility was shallow and the sky was a hazy gray. It looked like a thunder storm up ahead, the dust blocking out the sun and making the landscape even more bland and monotonous than it already was. The jeep rocked in the wind, and sometimes more than rocked, leaving me fighting to keep it in one lane. It went on and on and on...
Finally, we turned north and headed through the same monotonous landscape, except the sun was on a different side. The other difference was that there were lots of interesting abandoned and forgotten little outposts that I would have loved to have made an image of, had we the time and had I brought the 4x5. In fact, that stretch had lots and lots and lots of things I wanted to shoot... jaw dropping photographic possibilities (but I am attracted to decay and ennui as subject matter, so that is not necessarily a good thing). In between the abandoned cafes and other broke down locales the fields were dotted with oil derricks nodding slowly like giant angular birds everywhere you looked. Some, frozen, had run dry. Others pumped on.
We called it an night in Odessa, which we rolled into after dark, and which smelled like a gas leak. Hungry, dirty, and tired, we went into the restaurant attached to the hotel that the desk manager had sad was open until ten. It was eight. The waitresses-- at least three of them-- bustled past us, ignoring us waiting to be seated. A third of the tables had people at them. The rest, but for one, were covered in dishes and food, waiting to be cleared. None of the waitresses moved to clear them; none asked us to sit at the one table that was open and not dirty. After waiting a while we sat at the table ourselves. Through the open door I could see the women in the back, sometimes moving around, but mostly leaning on counters, drinking sodas out of large plastic cups, and smoking cigarettes. One eventually came out with another table's meal. She didn't even glance at us. Disgusted, we gave up and drove around looking for someplace else to eat.
Which took a while. Everything seemed well distanced from the highway. After much driving fruitlessly towards neon lights in the distance only to discover a GIANT car dealship using about a million kilowatts of electricty a minute to light up their GIANT car lot and the GIANT flag (American or Texan, take your pick) flapping above was the source, we finally found a Super Walmart with some chain restaurants clustered around it (next to a GIANT automall). Our waitress at Chili's was named Savannah, and we might as well have been speaking another language to her. Other than English. Which both of us stupidly assumed was the language we might have in common. Savannah's response to every single phrase that exited either of our mouths was a puzzled look, a tilt of the head, a ponderous moment, a head shake of incomprehension, followed by, "Excuse me?"
Ordering took some time.
After dinner we went to the Super Walmart to get some toiletries and toothbrushes and emergency underpants. The store was so large... and kind of oppressive with its largeness. After finding travel sized shampoo and toothpaste I headed to the women's section in search of underwear and found that in Texas even the smalls are supersized. All of the underwear packages were sizes 9, 10, 11, 12 and bigger. It took ten minutes to find a size five, and it was the only one of its kind.
Standing in line, ready to leave, the woman behind us uttered a stream of babytalk, "aren'tyoujustsocuteyesyouareyouaremybabymywittlebabybabybabyyesyouare!" I glanced back over my shoulder to see two women, one in her twenties, one in her thirties, and a miniature dog. The one in her twenties had dyed hair with lots of roots and was wearing an outfit entirely made up of clothing that didn't fit her. She was coming out of everywhere-- her bottom (top of crack visible, thank you) was rolling over her jeans, her belly was rolling over the belt, her breasts were oozing out of her bra and her back was rolling over the straps of it in the back, clearly visible through her too tight, too short top. The woman in her thirties seemed dressed to walk from the recliner to the kitchen: she was a large woman wearing sweatpants, a zip up hoodie, and slippers. Her dog, one of the smallest animals I've ever seen that was neither a rodent nor an insect, was sitting in her purse. In her purse. Where it might pee. On her wallet. This seemed like a stupid place to put her precious babywabybooboo, but what do I know. I just wanted to get the hell out of there.
Checking out the next morning the woman at the front desk spoke to us like we were errant children. She gave us a look that said if you were my child I'd smack you into next week, and her voice dripped with condescension. She was in her fifties and had deep, leathery creases in her face. She wore too much makeup and her hair was dyed orangey-blond and pulled back into a ponytail. She seemed to feel sorry for us that we weren't Odessans. We were happy to be on the road.
I remembered reading an article in the leadup to the last election in which Odessa was mentioned as a sort of twin city to Midland, next door. The article described Midland as the more upscale of the two. We drove through it, passing the sign that proclaimed it the hometown of George and Laura Bush, making me wonder about the concept of a "hometown," and what that means in a world of hypermobility. Schooled in Connecticut, summers in Kennebunkport-- how much of a hometown could Midland have been for the prez? Wouldn't Maine have claim equal to Texas on him? And Connecticut even more so? It makes me wonder about what my own hometown might be. The one where I was born? Where I went to high school? Where I went to college? Where I went to grad school? Not where my parents live-- a town near to, but not the town where I went to high school. But for six months in the late 1980s I haven't lived in the town where I was born or its suburbs since 1977. I would say Brooklyn, as the place I spent the longest in my adult life, and probably the place I loved the most... but it seems strange to claim a place where I have no roots, no family, no current connection to as my "hometown." I think I associate the idea of a hometown with parents-- but what if your parents have moved around? I wonder whether or not the concept of a hometown is something that will gradually disappear.
More decay and abandonment and oil derricks. At a certain point the road turned east and we hit Dallas-Ft. Worth, which just went on and on and on and on and on and on and on. It is and endless stretch of endlessness.... traffic and suburbs and traffic and suburbs and traffic and a few tall buildings and repeat. Finally on the other side... and still hours and hours and hours more driving to get before Texas would be behind us.
The further east we got, the greener the landscape got until we hit Texarkana, a town half in Texas and half in Arkansas. We buzzed through it quickly, happy to finally have Texas, The Endless State, behind us.
Arkansas passed by quickly and uneventfully. We zipped along the highway passing Hope, with its own sign about the presidential hometown connection to Clinton (weird how we ended up going through both of those...). We rolled into Arkadelphia (an improbable sort of name) for the night where a frat boy type of guy manned the desk of the hotel and we were served at dinner by the friendliest person we met on the entire drive.
We got up the next morning and walked across the street to the Waffle House for breakfast. We passed by a place with a great old sign called something like "The Pig Pit." Photographs may be forthcoming...
We skirted Little Rock and headed for the Tennessee border, crossing the Mississippi River into Memphis a few hours later. I'd never been to Memphis, and can't really say I've been now since we drove right through. It looked enticing from the highway, and of course I've wanted to go to Graceland for years and years and years.... a desire that predates seeing, but was solidified by watching, Mystery Train.
We kept heading east through Tennessee, which is pretty, the landscape closer to what I'm used to, more familiar, something that has its own comforts. We zipped through Nashville, which I went to for the first time last summer to see Tom Waits, and which I enjoyed visiting (though I wish I'd had more time to explore). We turned south and headed for P's hometown (there it is again) rolling up in the late afternoon and collapsing, exhausted, happy to be taking the next day off from driving. High point of the day came when Phil found his dad's bolt cutters and got the lock off the back of the moving truck. Yeay!
****
That day off totally rocked. I don't think I could have made it any further without it. The last day of driving was looooong, but at least it wasn't lonely since I got to ride in the truck with P. We crossed into Virginia and watched the rolling landscape, commenting on the pretty (if dilapidated) old farm houses along the way. The sun set, it got colder as we drove, and the closer we got to D.C. the more frequent the mileage signs. Once we turned on to 66 they were popping up every few miles. Traffic wasn't too heavy but the bit from Manassas to Arlington felt like it went on and on, both of us really really ready to be there already. We managed to find the house (for which I was proud of myself, since I don't drive and had only been there once, during the day, several weeks before), which was pretty exciting, and to get a little something to eat before collapsing again in preparation for unloading and returning the truck-- a project that took all the next day.
And just in time. We woke up the day after-- Sunday morning-- to a winter wonderland. Since then we packed up my apartment in D.C. and moved everything into the house... unpacking has proved a challenge. I'm hoping we'll make a serious dent in things this weekend.... Yeay! We're done moving! And I'm so much happier with Phil here, packing/moving/unpacking nonwithstanding. :)
